


Pumpkin Carving

by IRegretNothingAndEverything



Category: Half Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Darnold is mentioned, Domestic Bliss, Fluff, Found Family, Pumpkin carving, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:20:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26502796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IRegretNothingAndEverything/pseuds/IRegretNothingAndEverything
Summary: The Science Family carves pumpkins together!
Comments: 4
Kudos: 78





	Pumpkin Carving

**Author's Note:**

> I had fun with this! It's soft. V v nice.

“Cowboys!” Joshua cried, bouncing in his spot on the floor, staring at the pumpkin in front of him. Gordon laughed softly, handing him the marker to draw on the face that he wanted. Joshua grinned, one of his front teeth missing, having lost it at school the other day. 

“For sure buddy. You can do a cowboy.” Gordon ruffled Joshua’s hair, and he grinned that toothless grin again, turning to focus on the pumpkin with a single minded determination, getting marker marks on his fingers as he very carefully, or at least as careful as a six year old was capable of, begin to draw the face onto his pumpkin, his tongue poking out between his lips right where his tooth was missing. 

Looking away from Joshua, Gordon turned to the group as a whole. Dr. Coomer had a line of pumpkins in front of him, six to be exact, and had a seventh in his lap, very carefully drawing on it. Bubby sat next to him, by far the largest pumpkin in his lap, as he too was doodling on his own, though didn’t seem as worried about it as Coomer did. Tommy was on Joshua’s other side, three pumpkins near him, two on either side and one in his lap. Benrey was splayed out on Tommy’s other side, drawing across his pumpkin in a pattern that Gordon could not follow for the life of him. 

Gordon himself sat next to Joshua, separated from Dr. Coomer by his line of pumpkins. Gordon, at first, didn’t have his own pumpkin, as he focused on helping Joshua with his, but with Coomer and Tommy both having multiple, Gordon figured it would be fine to be a bit later than Joshua, as, when he got bored of it, Benrey would likely also be bored, and thus he’d have someone to distract him while the rest of them finished up. 

The look on the person’s face at the pumpkin patch when the group had rolled up with multiple carts, carrying 14 pumpkins of various sizes and shapes, had been glorious. If Gordon had been thinking, he would have gotten a picture. 

After a moment of deliberate, Gordon lifted his pumpkin into his lap, grabbing the last remaining marker to carefully draw on the face of it. He wanted to go for the effect of a cat, illuminated by the moon, though how well he had accomplished that in the end was... uncertain. He had to redraw the tail a few times as well, since it seemed too thin to stand up on it’s own. Relatively simple, he thought, setting it carefully in front of him to draw a circle around the top to follow when they cut them open. 

When he looked up, Tommy had two pumpkins finished, working on his third, all three with traditional jack-o-lantern faces printed on them, Bubby had finished his, and Gordon was completely unsurprised to find that it had a drawing of flames on it. Benrey’s resembled the PlayStation logo, another thing that Gordon was completely unsurprised to find. The only thing that surprised him was when he glanced to Coomer, seeing that he had finished the first pumpkin, setting in on the side between him and Bubby-Coomer had taken a large area of the living room for it and its seven pumpkins-and the pumpkin that he had finished with having a rather realistic, for marker on a pumpkin, drawing of Gordon. 

Bubby caught him staring at it, and grinned. “He does this every year with the two of us, but now, he has more to work with.” Gordon nodded, rather impressed, and recounted the pumpkins. There was one for each of the science team, and Joshua, though that was only six. He paused, before Coomer caught his eye setting aside a second pumpkin carefully as not to smear the marker, turning it to reveal Darnold’s visage. 

Darnold would have joined them, but apparently had a rather severe allergic reaction to pumpkin guts the last time he had tried to carve one, and thought it better to wait until after the carving as done, and then see what everything looked like. 

Joshua, at that moment, tugged on Gordon’s sleeve. “Daddy!” 

“Hey buddy!” He turned, grinning, as Joshua turned the pumpkin to reveal a rather messy face, signified as a cowboy by the hat on top of it’s head. Gordon grinned, then carefully took one of the wet wipes from besides him. “Looks awesome buddy! Why don’t we clean it up a bit so that you can follow the lines easier, huh?” 

Joshua nodded, and, carefully as not to ruin the face Joshua had made, Gordon wiped away stray marks and cleaned it up just a bit, though the integrity of Joshua’s cowboy pumpkin stayed the same. 

“There? Still look good?” Gordon asked, and Joshua made quite the show of examining it carefully, before nodding, and Gordon set it to the side carefully. “Good. Now we wait for the wet wipe to dry a bit so we don’t smudge it up, and then we can cut it open!” Joshua grinned, nodding again, before turning to look around at the others pumpkins with wide eyes. 

It took Coomer finishing drawing on a third pumpkin-Tommy this time- for Gordon to deem it safe to get up and grab the various carving materials. He had a large amount of smaller knives, as well as spoons to pull the guts out, which he wants to save for the seeds. Both he and Joshua loved roasted pumpkin seeds, and if the others didn’t know about them, then the two of them were going to teach them. 

“Alright buddy. Come here and we can take the top off!” Joshua grinned, clambering onto Gordon’s lap. Gordon mostly controlled the large knife, but Joshua kept his hands on the handle of it, as if taking charge of it. The managed to get the top of, and Joshua giggle loudly as Gordon pulled the top of the pumpkin out, the stringy guts of the pumpkin coming with it. He crawled across the floor of the living room to grab the large bowl in the middle of the room-which Gordon had lay with various trash bags-and sat it in front of Gordon with a wide grin, so that Gordon could cut the bottom of the top part of the pumpkin off and set it carefully to the side. 

Joshua, after the knife had been passed to Bubby, plunged his arm into the pumpkin, grabbing a handful of the guts and pulling it out, grinning, plopping it directly into the bowl. Gordon laughed softly, glancing around at the others. “You guys like roasted pumpkin seeds?” Benrey was the only one who looked slightly confused, as Gordon got a myriad of various yeses and nods from the others, as they were engrossed in their pumpkins. “Good. Save the guts, because we’re gonna have so many seeds from this.” He shot a look at Coomer’s collection. 

Joshua grabbed a spoon, reaching his arm into the pumpkin to scrape the sides of it, while Gordon carved the top off of his own, gathering the pumpkin guts to set to the side in the bowl, which Gordon began to realize might not be big enough. It was the biggest one that he owned, but he realized quickly he might need to grab the other bowls as well, just in case. 

“Hold on a moment.” He said, standing to go do so, grabbing three more bowls to set along the group, as they began to pull guts from their various pumpkins, as Coomer began his final pumpkin, which seemed to be the one of Bubby. The amount of pumpkin guts that were coming from the pumpkins in total, the amount of seeds was exciting, as he had only really had one pumpkin in the past. Fourteen pumpkins worth of seeds? It was a little overwhelming, but in the best way. 

He settled back in his spot, going about removing the pumpkin guts from his, scraping along the sides to drag the last bit of it out of the pumpkin. Joshua climbed back into his lap so they could start carving Joshua’s pumpkin, Gordon’s hands over Joshua’s as they carved carefully, setting aside the pieces as Joshua reached in to push them out of their spots. Once finished, Joshua took it upon himself to clean off the remaining sharpie marks with a wet wipe, cleaning off his hands as well. 

Just as Gordon predicted, once his pumpkin was done, Joshua grew bored, but Benrey finished rather quickly after, and managed to busy Joshua with removing the seeds from the pumpkin guts into a little pile. Gordon took that to finish his pumpkin quickly, tongue also poking out of his mouth in a similar way that Joshua’s had been earlier, as he carefully carved along the curved lines. 

Bubby set his pumpkin next to Joshua’s finished one, quickly followed by Tommy setting one with triangle eyes and square teeth next to it as well. Coomer had finally begun to remove the pumpkin guts, choosing to do this step all at once with all of the pumpkins, leaving him covered with pumpkin guts, though it was grinning, so Gordon assumed that it didn’t mind at all. 

Tommy passed him one of his pumpkins, one with a scowling, angry face, as Joshua was still engrossed in removing the seeds from the guts. Gordon grinned, pressing himself to Tommy’s side as they worked, Tommy working on another grinning pumpkin. 

The group was mostly finished-excluding the obvious of Coomer, who was very carefully carving out Darnold’s face in the first pumpkin, Bubby leaning against it’s back as it worked, humming some sort of song that Gordon couldn’t identify. Once Tommy’s last two pumpkins were finished and set to the side, Gordon grabbed the small electric candles, setting them inside each pumpkin, before settling next to Joshua and Benrey, listening to them argue in a strange way that Gordon couldn’t fully follow, helping remove the seeds from the pumpkin guts, grinning along as Joshua seemed to be winning. 

Hours later, the fourteen pumpkins sat all in a line in front on the porch, as the family inside roasted pumpkin seeds and threw the guts at one another, laughing.

**Author's Note:**

> Coomer is inexplicably very talented at pumpkin carving.


End file.
